While the great mass of students in the stands were still filing out of the Quidditch pitch, Cho already had a quill in hand, beginning her letter among the cheers of the crowd.

------------------

When Cho read the first line of Katie's reply ("Dean? Dean THOMAS? Dean Thomas who I know doesn't own a broom of his own? That's it, we're doomed!"), she had to put her hand to her mouth to keep from laughing too hard. She could picture Katie's face as easily as if she had been right there with her instead of in a hospital bed.

Marietta watched Cho as she read her letter, and said after she had finished reading, "You know, I don't think you're really writing to Katie Bell. I think there's some mysterious boy you don't want to tell me about from far-off lands you're exchanging letters with."

Cho looked at her with the utmost of seriousness and said, "Maybe I am."

Marietta's smile fell. It was clear she couldn't tell if Cho was making a joke or not. "Really?" Her eyes grew wide.

"How's things with you and Eddie?" Cho asked, making a very calculated grin.

"Shh! Not so loud!" Marietta protested, for Eddie was sitting on her other side. Through the general noise of the Great Hall, he seemed to have missed the conversation going on next to him.

------------------

It was halfway through writing another letter to Katie describing Ravenclaw's victory over Hufflepuff when Cho realised just how far they were both falling behind with their study plan. When they were working together, quickly looking up some information from their textbooks that they needed to continue with their practical work was a quick process, but Cho had found that glancing down and re-checking the exact instructions for an incantation and then performing said incantation was a much more difficult process when alone. Katie had reported back that reading chapters of theory took much longer because she had nobody to discuss the theory with immediately after. Neither of them would be able to catch up and be ready for their N.E.W.T.s if Katie stayed in St Mungo's for much longer, and it looked like the Healers planned to keep her there until past Christmas, so it was clear something had to change.

Cho thought about what they could do for the rest of the day, and had a plan formed by the next morning. Before she put it into action, though, she would have to speak with two of the professors.

------------------

"Are you sure this is what you want to do?" asked Professor Flitwick again, lowering his head as he looked at Cho. It was like he was peering over a pair of invisible glasses. "As I remember, you were quite set in your plans of becoming a Healer when you selected your classes for the N.E.W.T.s."

"I'm quite sure, Professor," she replied.

"Very well," he said, "I'll inform Professor Slughorn that you will no longer be attending his classes."

------------------

Cho waited until she was certain the last of the students had left the classroom before knocking on the door. "Professor Firenze?" she asked into the classroom.

"Enter," came the centaur's voice. His classroom was as Katie had said it was. It was an odd feeling of unreality, going outside from inside, from the middle of the day to twilight, but one more interesting than unsettling.

"Professor," she began, "do you have any copies of the overview for N.E.W.T. Divination left? The kind that was given out at the beginning of the year."

Firenze regarded her for a moment. "I do not believe you are one of my students," he said, "or you would know I don't require being called 'Professor'." His voice, like his expression, was unreadable, impassive.

"Oh, it's not for me, it's for Katie Bell. She's in St Mungo's, and-"

"Ah, yes. A terrible thing, what happened to that girl." He turned from her and began tending to one of the trees standing in the classroom: an easy feat, because of his height.

"I was working together with Katie this year, studying for our N.E.W.T.s, and I wanted to work out a better study plan for both of us since she's going to be in the hospital for a while, but I don't really know what's required in..." She trailed off, as any further explanation seemed unnecessary: Firenze had taken a length of parchment, contained and possibly concealed, from the branches of the tree, and was offering it to Cho. She took it and gave her thanks.

"These are dark times we are living in," Firenze told her, "and perhaps darker times ahead. It is often our connections to others that stop us from falling into the darkness. Good luck with your study, child."

------------------

It was Marietta who found Cho asleep in the common room, rolls of parchment spread out on the table in front of her, a half-finished cup of cold tea set off to the side. Cho jumped awake at the disturbance in the room and rubbed her eyes, and then yawned loudly.

"Have... have you been here all night?" Marietta asked.

"Mm-hm." Cho nodded indistinctly and started rolling up some of the pieces of parchment.

"What were you doing? It looks like you tried to get all the year's homework out of the way in one go."

"Hm? No, I-" She broke off in another long yawn. "-I was working on a new timetable for my classwork, and I was checking it through and I just stopped for a moment to rest my eyes."

"Oh." Marietta considered for a moment, then asked, "A whole night? You're usually a bit quicker about stuff like this."

"I was trying a different way of planning my classes," Cho said, tying together a her collection of scrolls with a length of ribbon, "and I had to make a second copy, too."

"What, in case you lost the first one?"

"No, to send to Katie. She's still in school, even if she's not, you know, still in the school."

------------------

The sign-up sheet for students planning on going home over the Christmas break hung on a noticeboard outside of the Great Hall between two large wreaths. Cho was passing this noticeboard between classes when she had an idea, and without bothering to take the time to examine this idea, to think upon it twice or to check it for potential problems, acted and added her name to the list without any intention of telling her parents she had done so.

------------------

After hugging Marietta goodbye and watching her vanish from sight with a pop just outside the gates to Hogwarts, somehow less threatening when covered in bright white snow, Cho fixed the image in her head of the place she would Apparate to. It was not just outside of her home.

------------------

She stepped inside the Leaky Cauldron, unprepared that it would be as drastically changed as the street outside. Somehow, she had expected it would always be the same as the first time she had been here as a child: a warm, happy place filled with the noise of people and lots of flickering candle-light. Now it was silent and empty, save for the bald innkeeper who stood behind the bar idly cleaning with an old rag. He looked surprised to see Cho and eyed her with some suspicion as she approached him.

"I'd like a room, please," she said with confidence.

"For how long?" asked the innkeeper, his hand that held the rag still moving in slow circles over the bar.

"Over Christmas. But," she added hastily, "I haven't got a lot of money with me at the moment, so I can't pay anything up-front. But as soon as I can, I'll go to Gringotts, and-"

"Haven't you heard?"

"Heard what?"

"The goblins have Gringotts locked down even tighter because of new security measures. They're lucky to see fifteen people a day, from what I hear. You'll be waiting until well past Christmas to get any money out, if you think you're just going to go in there and get it."

"Oh," Cho said. Her eyes fell away to the floor. She looked back up and had been planning to asked the innkeeper something, but stopped because of the way he was watching her.

"Practically all the rooms I've got upstairs are empty," he said after a long moment's silence, "and at Christmas I've usually never got empty rooms. People are scared, like if they hang around Diagon Alley too long they'll get nabbed off the street. Because of that, the last girl I had working tables here cleared off, said she was going to go visit her aunt up country." He stowed the rag somewhere behind the bar, and rested both his hands on top of the counter. "I'll make you a deal: you can have one of those empty rooms upstairs free of charge, if you help out a bit around here in the evenings when I've actually got customers. Deal?"

Cho wasted very little time in considering before she said, "It's a deal," and extended her hand. The innkeeper gave her a crooked smile and they shook, briefly, and Cho thought a little of the old warmth she remembered in the Leaky Cauldron.

------------------

Cho stood a little outside the open door in St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, running through her mind different ways to step through it. She finally decided the best way - the one that would quickest solve the lump of nerves writhing in her stomach - would to just go in and see what happened.

In the room were several beds, but only one was occupied. Beside the occupied bed was a pile of brightly-coloured objects, boxes, and boxed objects - Cho assumed these were products from Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes. Sitting on a little table, along with a lamp with a pale green shade over it, was an assortment of cards, some expressing get-well sentiments, others Christmas wishes. In the bed, propped up by a pillow, was Katie, open textbook in her lap. She looked up, and for a moment looked like she was having trouble believing what she was seeing.

"Cho?"

"Hi, Katie," she said.

"You... you never told me you were coming!" Whether Katie was trying to sound accusatory, Cho never knew; the smile she gave would have made it impossible for her to seem negative about anything she had said.

"Surprise," Cho said meekly. She could feel a smile blooming of her own.

Katie snapped her book shut and gestured frantically for Cho to come closer, and she enveloped her in a fierce hug that was almost enough to make Cho lose her balance and topple her onto the bed. "Tell me everything! How did you get here? How long have you been planning this? This is why you never said anything about what you were doing for Christmas in your letters, isn't it? How long are you here for? Have you always been this good at keeping secrets? What else don't I know?"

Cho laughed and squeezed Katie a little tighter. She pulled a chair that sat beside one of the empty beds closer and sat, and she and Katie began talking, and it was like they had never been separated.

------------------

And so it went. Cho would catch up on schoolwork with Katie during the day and clean and wait tables in the Leaky Cauldron in the evenings, and each night she would go fall into bed both mentally and physically exhausted, but feeling a real sense of accomplishment that was only a pale comparison to things like a perfect score on an exam or grabbing the tiny fluttering Snitch out of the air. Each night she would fall asleep thinking she was having the best Christmas ever.

------------------

"If they keep me here much longer," Katie said, lifting her eyes from her textbook and glancing at Cho, "I'm going to put in a request for you to be my Healer. You'd get on with things way faster than anyone here."

"Hm?" Cho marked the page she had been reading and closed her own book.

"You know, because there's a lot of training to be a Healer. Implying I would be here for another couple of years. Because I was making a joke."

"Oh." Cho smiled, though it felt forced. She had been avoiding telling Katie what she was about to say; she was unsure exactly why. "I don't think I'm going to be a Healer any more. I dropped Potions, when I reworked our study schedule."

"Oh." Katie sounded surprised. Not disappointed, or upset. Just surprised. "What do you want to do instead?"

"I'm not sure."

"Hey, you should fix brooms!"

Katie's outburst was so sudden, so bright - so Katie - that Cho laughed aloud before she was able to respond.

"What? Be serious."

"I am!" And she was, under the excitement, Cho saw, and she felt a more genuine smile forming on her face. "You sent me a letter with a page and a half on the entire process of strengthening your Comet's braking Charm, you never cared that much when a potion turned out right."

"I suppose, but... broom repair? Really?"

"Think about it," Katie said, and went to open her textbook again. She traced along the page with her finger for a moment, and then asked, "Did you have to drop Potions to make the timetable work?"

Cho thought about this for a moment. "In part," she answered. "It made things a lot easier if I had one less class. A lighter workload meant we could keep studying the way we had been."

A smile came across Katie's face that was quite different to her usual one. "Oh," she said. It seemed like the smile had surprised her, somehow.

------------------

On Boxing Day, Katie had visitors beyond just Cho. When Cho arrived at St Mungo's, she found three other people in the room; a short woman with a wild shock of hair and heavy boots prominent at the bottom of her robes, and two men who could not have been anything but father and son. The elder had long greying hair tied back in a ponytail; the younger wore Muggle clothes and a shorter haircut. Cho saw something in the younger man's face that looked more like Katie than his father, and concluded immediately this must be Katie's parents and her brother Andrew.

They greeted Cho warmly, recognising her also as the friend that had been so worried about Katie, and Katie's mother Maggie conjured a chair for her to sit on and insisted she stay with them. Cho agreed but stayed mostly quiet, only answering questions that were posed directly to her. She found the interaction of Katie and her family fascinating. They were more like close friends, with a wealth of odd in-jokes they kept pausing the conversation for to explain for Cho's benefit. They laughed easily, joked with each other; they were all equals, Cho saw, and she understood this was how Katie had become so open and so fearless about speaking her mind, if these were the people she had grown up around. As the day went on, Cho found their good natures infectious, and towards the afternoon she found herself sharing some stories about her and Katie from school, laughing freely at jokes and even making a couple herself.

By a stroke of handy coincidence, the time Katie's family had to leave to make the train home and Cho was to begin her shift at the Leaky Cauldron came within minutes of each other. The four of them stood to leave together, and handshakes, hugs, and goodbyes were exchanged throughout the room.

In the hallway, Andrew hung back from his parents walking away, and stood with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He looked like he was waiting for Cho.

"Katie tells me you're staying in Diagon Alley," he said.

"I am." Cho was unsure where this conversation was headed, but Andrew's tone didn't indicate it was going somewhere pleasant.

"I hear it's dangerous in the Wizard world at the moment. I hope your parents are okay with you being out on your own like that."

Cho looked into his eyes and felt a strong urge to explain herself, to say something that would move away from this subject, but she knew anything she said would only help the impression she had been caught in a lie, and Andrew knew it. He seemed to study her for a long time before speaking again.

"You've been helping Katie with her schoolwork this year."

"We've been helping each other," Cho clarified.

"And you came here so you could study together."

"Yes."

"On your Christmas break."

"That's right."

Andrew's expression remained stony for a moment, and then broke into a wide smile similar to the one Cho had seen Katie use many times before. "That sounds like you're a pretty good friend, you know."

Cho found herself smiling back. "I guess so."

"Hey, what do you think your parents would say, if they knew what you were doing?" His entire presence had changed. Cho got the feeling that Andrew, due to his size and what Katie had told her was generally an easy-going nature, had little idea of how intimidating he was capable of being.

"I'm... not sure." She imagined the faces of her mother and father, if she had told them she had spent almost two weeks away from the protection of Hogwarts and Albus Dumbledore; outside it might be that nobody else would be able to see the change, but inside she knew they would be growing hard like stone, cold like ice.

"They pretty strict? Your parents."

Cho had never considered this much - her parents had always been part of that class of adults, along with the professors at school, to be respected and listened to - but on having been told over and over this year that she was to be treated as an adult and especially after meeting Katie's parents in person, she was beginning to have a somewhat different view on what made a person an adult.

"I suppose they are," she said at last.

Andrew nodded, although this gesture seemed mostly to be towards himself. "Thought they might be."

"How did you know that?"

"I've just got a pretty good read on people, most of the time." He smiled somewhat cryptically, and then said, "Hey, there's something I forgot to tell Katie. I'm going to go do that before my parents can decide to leave me here, alright?"

"Sure."

Andrew clapped Cho on the shoulder as he passed by her. "Stay a good friend to my sister," he said, his hand on the door to Katie's room.

"I'll try my best."

He nodded again to himself, and disappeared behind the door. Cho stood in the hallway of the hospital for a moment, unable to decide exactly how she should take Andrew Bell.

------------------

The last night she was to stay in Diagon Alley, Tom told Cho she wasn't needed in the pub tonight, although it was been no more or less busy than the other nights she had helped out. When she protested, Tom insisted. He had a look like he knew (or thought he knew) more than he let on, but Cho had seen him look this way many times in just two weeks, so she thought very little of it as she made the now-familiar walk through St Mungo's to Katie's room.

She found Katie in the middle of writing a letter, which she promptly folded in half and put on the table beside her bed as soon as Cho entered the room. Cho didn't plan on asking who it was to.

"Hey," Katie said, "didn't expect you back so soon." She said this with a smile, but it was different in a way Cho couldn't identify. Maybe she had surprised Katie more than she had expected.

"I've got a night off," she said, and sat on the chair next to Katie's bed.

"It's a good job you've got. The pay's terrible, but you get benefits like surprise holidays." Katie laughed a little at this, but it seemed to Cho like she was forcing herself to. Cho tried to think of what to say to this - to play along with the joke, to ask what was wrong, to talk to Katie about the things she had been thinking of as she walked up the stairs - but could find nothing that seemed fitting. The room suddenly seemed like it was very quiet.

"Cho, why did you come here?" Katie asked, and there was none of her usual energy in her voice. If this were a serious question - and it felt to Cho like it was an incredibly serious one - it was as if Katie felt she had to repress anything non-serious in her in order to ask it.

"Tonight? I just said, because Tom-"

"No, for Christmas." Katie was not looking at her.

"I didn't want you to fall behind," Cho said, not sure about the kind of answer she wanted to hear.

"And that's... that's all?" Katie was looking at her hands, twisting them in her lap, making her ugly injury move in and out of sight.

"No, I... you're my friend, too, I wanted to... what's wrong?" For she had realised that Katie was on the verge of tears.

"Nothing. Just something my stupid brother said."

"What was that?"

"It doesn't matter," she said, and sniffed.

After a long moment, Cho said, "It wasn't the same at school, without you. I missed you. I-" She had been about to say 'I wanted to come see you', but was unable to get out the words because Katie was leaning across, leaning into her, pressing her lips against hers, and kissing her. Cho could feel the heat from her face, the wetness from her tears, she could feel these things and not see them because her own eyes had closed. For a moment she thought of nothing, feeling like time had slowed, but then the thoughts came, the thoughts that told her this was wrong, asked her what she was doing, demanded she explain herself. Cho pulled back, pulled away, and she could not tell if it was surprise or hurt she saw in Katie's face.

"I..." she began, but found she couldn't find the words. They were all caught in her throat. She turned and left the room, not knowing where she would go, but knowing she couldn't stay here.

------------------

Cho paced back and forth in her rented room above the Leaky Cauldron. Usually, if she had to think about something, she would sit down and let her eyes focus on some irrelevant point in the distance, see all the pieces of the problem in her head, remain still. This didn't feel like a time to remain still.

The room was small, so she could only pace back and forth a couple of steps. It created a rhythm in her head. One two, turn, one two, turn, one two, turn. Katie, turn, Katie, turn, Katie. She liked Katie. She was a good friend. An amazing friend. Was still an amazing friend. But Cho didn't like her like that, did she? She had been in love with Cedric, hadn't she? She was sure about that, wasn't she? How do you know? How do you know? How do you...?

After a night of very little sleep, Cho was woken by the flutter of wings in her room. She sprang from her bed to read the letter. It was from Katie, and was very short.

Please, come see me today. I want to talk. Please.

------------------

A long moment passed between the time Cho entered Katie's room and when she spoke. During this time, both girls looked at each other, seeming unsure about who should speak first.

"Hi Katie," Cho said.

"Hey," she replied. Her hands were in her lap again. Cho could see her eyes were red. Maybe she had been crying. Maybe she hadn't been sleeping.

Cho took a tentative step forward just as Katie began to speak. "I'm sorry that that happened, I just... if you don't want to be friends with me any more, I'll understand-"

"What? No-"

"-and we can just pretend that it never-"

"No, I don't... no!" Katie broke off, looking stunned. "I don't want to stop being your friend," Cho managed, trying to keep her voice even.

"I thought..." Katie said in a very quiet voice, "I thought you might feel the same way."

"I don't know if I do or not," Cho said. She was staring at the floor as she spoke.

"But you ran, why would you-"

"I don't know!" She raised her voice a little louder than she would have believed she would be willing to raise it in the hospital. "I don't know," she said, and she could feel tears pricking at the sides of her eyes, "but I don't want to stop being your friend." She had been drawing closer and closer to Katie's bed with each outburst, and now she knelt beside it. Cho didn't feel like she could look directly at Katie without crying properly, so she kept her focus on Katie's hands. "I just... want to be with you. I like being with you."

"I like being with you, too," Katie said, her voice just above a whisper. Against her better judgement, Cho looked up, and saw that Katie was smiling, a small smile that seemed somehow very fragile on her tear-lined face.

"So what do we do now?" Cho asked.

"I don't know."

"Neither do I."

"I think," Katie said after a long pause, "we should keep writing."

Cho smiled. "I think I would like that."

"I think I would, too."

------------------

Cho stood outside the gates into Hogwarts with two other seventh-years - a Slytherin boy and Cormac McLaggen, who she had Potions with and secretly was a little disappointed that this year she had less opportunity to see Professor Snape tell him off. None of them spoke to each other, not during waiting for Professor Sprout to let them through the gates, nor along the walk up to the castle, nor anything about Filch and his sadistic joy at actually being allowed to enforce security. Cho had the very brief thought, while being scanned with a Secrecy Sensor, that everything she had done during Christmas would be discovered - her deceit in leaving the school, her staying in Diagon Alley, her kiss with Katie, all of it - and she would have to find some way of explaining it all, and found that she would not be able to.

To her immense relief, the Secrecy Sensor remained silent.

------------------

On the first day after classes began, a letter came from Cho's parents. It was only after she had sent her owl off with two letters, one bound for her home and one for a room in St Mungo's, that she realised she couldn't remember any of what she had written to her parents about.

------------------

It was a halfway through the second week of the new term that Cho came to a conscious realisation of how much she was anticipating the mail each morning - she and Katie were now exchanging letters back and forth on a daily basis, and while their content had not changed significantly, the way Cho felt about them had. She felt happy about seeing a letter for her, without fail, and always gave what Katie wrote a lot of consideration on and off during the day. She enjoyed the time she purposely set aside each day to write her letter back, too, when she would make her way to Ravenclaw Tower and take a spot in the common room with the afternoon sun hanging low in the sky, and she didn't find she minded too much if she was a little late back from the Owlery and dinner had already begun.

Except, hadn't getting a letter from Katie always been like this? Hadn't she always felt the little bolt of excitement when an owl dropped something at her place, doubly so because she knew who it was from? Hadn't she always spent the spare moments in the day thinking about what she would write back? For that matter... maybe there was something a little different in the letters, too. Neither of them had mentioned what had happened on the last day she had been at St Mungo's, but neither had it really felt like it was being avoided. It was merely a thing that was just... there.

It was later that day during a moment of concentrating on a passage she was reading in her Charms textbook that she had held her hand to her face and furrowed her brow, and thought of Katie in her bed at St Mungo's, propped up with a pillow and reading possibly the same passage she herself was reading by pale-green lamp light, and she absently brushed a finger across her lips and realised with very little fanfare that she was absolutely, unmistakably, undeniably falling in love with Katie Bell.

------------------

Although Roger insisted on more intensive training sessions to prepare for the Ravenclaw's last match of the year after his team's loss to Slytherin, Cho felt she should have perhaps told him he needn't have been so hard on the rest of the team; she had flown poorly during that day owing to Zacharias Smith's snide commentary, and Draco Malfoy had been unusually aggressive in combing the sky for the Snitch, so she blamed nobody but herself for their loss. She had the impression that the rest of the team thought she was quite upset at herself over the loss, and this was the reason she was quiet and somewhat distant during practice, but the reality of things was that Cho was using this time to think about her feelings towards Katie. It was easy to swap letters back and forth comparing their study notes and day-to-day lives, and Cho found it was a lot more difficult to set her heart aside while on her broom than it was while she was reading one of her textbooks. Quidditch was something she and Katie had talked about - flying was something they had done together - but Katie's presence wasn't with her here, so being at the Quidditch pitch just made her feel lonely.

It was during one of these practice sessions in early February that Cho got an idea that made her smile. The more she thought about it, the better an idea it seemed, the more it made sense. She was the first to leave the pitch after practice, and as she did the rest of the Ravenclaw team all agreed amongst themselves that the old Cho was back and ready to go for their last game this year.

------------------

Cho Chang

Ravenclaw Tower

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

February 14th, 1997

Katie Bell

Fourth Floor - Spell Damage

St Mungo's Hospital of Magical Maladies and Injuries

Dear Katie,

I'm writing this letter so you can understand a bit a bit about how I've been feeling, and how I feel now. I'm not sure if I'll send it or not - it might just help me if I just write these things down - but it's going to get written down either way.

There was a time at school when I was really happy with my life, because I was doing well with my classes and I was part of the Quidditch team and I had a really great boyfriend. I thought that was what I wanted, with life. I don't know how far I was really thinking about things, I just knew that if I kept my grades good then I could go on to be a good Healer, and if I had a great boyfriend he could go on to be a good husband and we'd have a good family, and those were the things that I thought that I wanted, so I was happy.

But when Cedric died, all of that changed. I just couldn't make myself feel happy again, and I could see my grades starting to slip down, and I just kept thinking there had to be something wrong with me, that I couldn't be happy, and it made me feel worse and made my grades keep dropping. I thought Harry would understand some of that, but he already had a circle of his friends to get support from, and that made me realise I didn't have anything like that. I had what seemed like so many friends when I was feeling happy, but they all drifted away when I started getting more and more depressed, and I think the D.A. was the last straw for most of them. I thought the holidays from school would fix it all, that I could forget everything I had been feeling at school and come back fresh and clear and I'd be able to just concentrate on my grades and be happy again, but that didn't happen. Instead I just kept feeling more trapped, more and more cut off and alone from everything, like there was nobody I could talk to.

And then I met you, Katie. Everything about you was just light and brightness and warmth. It was like my whole life had been spent in this one tiny room, and the walls had been slowly getting closer and closer to me, but I had no idea because all the lights were out, and you, your light, you showed me not only how close the walls were coming but also the way out of that little room. You helped me more than I think that you know, just by being yourself, so free and open and ready to follow exactly what your heart wants. You showed me that what I so desperately wanted to be again wasn't making me happy, and that I could be happy in other ways. It was you the whole time that made me happy, I was just happy to be around you, to be with you. And the rest of those things, the perfect grades to be a Healer, being popular with lots of friends, having the perfect boyfriend, those things didn't seem to be so important any more, because you made me happy. Really, truly happy.

On Valentine's Day, people give each other things that look like hearts, because it represents their feelings for each other. This letter contains my feelings, all the emotions I've had. This letter is my heart, and I give it to you.

With my love,

Cho

------------------

The letter that came in response made Cho smile from the first line.

You should be the Gryffindor, not me, it read, because that's just about the bravest thing I've ever read. Now I feel a little bad that I didn't even realise what the day was today (this Cho forgave instantly, knowing how heavily Katie relied on the spell that produced the date and user's current location by tapping on a piece of parchment), but I will find a way to make it up to you, don't worry. Better yet, you won't know when it's coming, and I already owe you a surprise. But I'm just avoiding writing down what I really want to put in this letter, but I guess I should be a bit brave too, even if it feels strange to ask this in a letter (but I've never asked anyone in person either, so what do I know?)

Okay, enough procrastinating.

Cho Chang, bravest sweetest person that I know, would you be my girlfriend? Officially and seriously and all that comes with it. I think I know what it is you'll answer, but just so you know, I'll be waiting for it to come as soon as possible all the same.

Cho re-folded the letter and put it carefully in one of her pockets, then took an empty piece of parchment from her other pocket and quickly wrote her reply of yes, yes I will, you know that I will.

------------------

The next few weeks felt like they flew by very quickly. Cho could concentrate in her classes where before the lectures from her professors seemed like they dragged. She tore through her reading each night. She threw herself into Quidditch practice. She could almost physically feel her life righting itself, like she was a train that had come loose of its rails but slipped its wheels smoothly back onto the tracks. Marietta continued to accuse her of writing in secret to some foreign boy. Cho took great joy in playing along with her theories.

After finishing a lengthy written account of Gryffindor's latest and most embarrassing defeat - at which Cho knew Katie would first explain how it would not have occurred were she there to fly for Gryffindor, then berate Harry for his poor choice in players, then suggest Cormac McLaggen be on the receiving end of some nasty combination of hexes and jinxes - Cho paused a moment before setting off to the Owlery. She took another length of parchment and began writing a letter home to her parents. She wrote about how she had been feeling since the beginning of sixth year, how difficult school had been for her, about her friends, about Harry Potter, about Cedric. She wrote about Katie and how much she had helped her, about no longer taking N.E.W.T.-level Potions, about no longer wanting to be a Healer. She concluded the letter with the summation she and Katie had been having through their past couple of letters about what they would both do after Hogwarts, writing she would try and get an apprenticeship with a broom-maker: out of all her classes, she enjoyed Charms the most, and broom manufacture was very Charm-heavy, she'd be involved in some way with something else she always liked, Quidditch; she might even be able to design her own model of broom one day.

Cho sent this letter and felt no fear, no apprehension about the response it might provoke. None came the next day, or the next, or the day after that. A letter did come back from her parents, eventually. It was very short, and said that while her parents were disappointed Cho wasn't going to follow the dream she had for so many years of being a Healer, they were proud their daughter was setting high goals for herself, and knew she would achieve what she wanted.

Folding the letter up, Cho started thinking about names for a brand of racing brooms.

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A letter came on a Saturday morning late in April that was much shorter than Katie's usual letters. This one only said that she would be unable to write for a couple of days, but that Cho should be awake early on the coming Tuesday. Cho folded the letter (more of a note than a letter, really) in two and ate her breakfast in quiet contemplation, wondering if she could manage to act surprised to see Katie back at school. Maybe, she thought as she glanced at the door to the Great Hall and felt the now-familiar flickery butterfly feeling in her stomach, she wouldn't have to.

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The empty Great Hall around sunrise wasn't an unfamiliar sight to Cho, who had often been the first student present on weekends when the Ravenclaw Quidditch team scheduled a morning practice session, but it was always a sight she was unprepared for. The Great Hall was just supposed to have people in it, students eating, students talking, students listening to Professor Dumbledore, students gathered in pockets doing their homework. It was especially foreign when even the ghosts found somewhere else to be. Whenever it was empty, it seemed somehow both less and more than itself - less impressive but much larger, a big empty chamber for the echoes to live in. Any sound made seemed to never fade away, just bounce off the walls forever.

Like now, for example. The great door creaking open seemed amplified a hundredfold. Cho looked up from the spot on the floor she had been examining to see the figure who had pushed open the door, and all at once the Great Hall no longer felt empty and abandoned.

"Surprise," said Katie, beaming.

"I had no idea," Cho said, although her tone said otherwise. She pushed off from the foot of the Ravenclaw table and started walking towards Katie.

Katie made a face at her, but kept smiling all the same. "We can't all be masters of deception like you." She put her arms around Cho, and Cho hugged her back tightly. Her hair smelled faintly of shampoo.

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"So how's being back?" Cho asked. She sat at the table, but didn't open any of her books.

"You know, it's funny. Everyone only wants to hear about what happened in Hogsmeade. I've started telling everyone I can't remember anything until a couple of weeks ago, it distracts them with wanting to tell me stuff that's happened." Katie's own books still sat in her bag, which lay on the floor at her feet.

"People are very sympathetic to amnesiacs," Cho said sagely.

"Nobody cares about my scar." Katie waved her hand with a flourish. It no longer looked like it was in the healing stages from a mauling by some savage animal, but a knot of scar tissue still ran along the side of her her hand and partway up her wrist. It still had the dark colour of a fresh bruise Cho had noticed during the Christmas holidays.

"It looks ghastly." Cho pretended to busy herself with finding the right chapter in her textbook.

"I've never had any proper scars before. I think it's cool." Katie flexed her fingers and made a great deal of observing the effect on her hand.

Cho reached out and held Katie's wiggling fingers between her own hands in an effort to stop her marvelling at her injury, even though neither of them were as disgusted or fascinated with it as may have appeared to an outsider. Katie shifted in Cho's grasp so they were holding hands across the table. Cho smiled and dropped her gaze, like doing so would disguise the blush she felt creep across her cheeks. Katie gave a nervous little laugh and went to fetch her wand from her robe, dropping her hands.

"Hey, I wanted to show you something. Watch this, I've been working on it." Her face showed a deep concentration, and she waved her wand at a blank spot on the table. A squat copper kettle appeared, arriving on a folded hand-towel and accompanied by two broad teacups that looked better suited to coffee than tea.

"I can do it with a sugar pot, too, and a little milk jug. I haven't been able to get more than two cups at once, though." At this last, Katie looked a little disappointed.

"Two is enough," Cho reassured her. "That's really impressive." As she poured the tea, she added, "Bet everyone's going to be really surprised when you do so well in your N.E.W.T.s when you're meant to have been unconscious for... what, four months?"

"Well, of course I did, I had the best partner, didn't I?"

Cho scanned Katie's face for the tell-tale signs of of joke-making, but found none. Katie carefully set down the brass kettle and looked at Cho, and took a deep breath before she spoke.

"I'm serious about that. You could have found someone else to work with after I went to St Mungo's - you could have even just done the work on your own, you're smart enough - but you didn't. You... fought really hard to see I wouldn't fall behind. I've never had to fight for anything before, just sort of taken things as they came, but you changed that. You stay my partner, you work up a whole different study plan to work around me being in the hospital, you write pages and pages of notes and letters, you come and see me over Christmas. You made me want to fight for something like that." Katie took Cho's hands from across the table again, and looked into her eyes, her gaze intent and unswerving.

"And, I think," Katie said softly, "I've found something worth fighting for."

"Katie..." Cho breathed, unsure of what she could say next. The world suddenly seemed very small, at a size to just contain the two of them, their table, and the tea-set.

"You're a really special person, Cho. I just... yeah, thought you should know. You're very special to me."

Cho squeezed Katie's hands and felt her squeeze back. It felt like her smile was stopping her from being able to say anything. "Thankyou," she managed.

"I know it's not all formal and in writing and everything," Katie began, some of the seriousness falling from her face.

"It was perfect," Cho said. "It came right from the heart."

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"You ready?"

"Mm-hm. You?"

"Oh yeah." Katie pulled the strap on her glove tight for the final time, and fastened it. "Nervous?"

"A little." Cho had no gloves, and was rubbing her hands together in short intense bursts. It was a gesture she had picked up from Katie.

"Me too," Katie said, and flexed her fingers, testing them. She looked up from her hands and smiled at Cho. "Hey, I'll be happy for you, if Ravenclaw wins."

Cho laughed, suddenly finding their situation of the two of them preparing together for a Quidditch match where they would play on opposite sides utterly surreal. "We should be going to the pitch," she said.

"Yeah." Katie stood, and Cho followed her. They walked to the Quidditch pitch together, drawing some glances from other students they passed; only natural, since their walking together and chatting went against the particularly fervent divide this match had created between the Houses.

"Good luck," Cho said when they had reached the point where they would have to head in opposite directions to the changing rooms. "Score a lot of points."

Katie chuckled. "Nice one. You too."

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It was the first Quidditch match Cho had ever played where she hadn't kept focused on the scores, doing a quick count in her head whenever a goal was announced and checking it against the total points Ravenclaw had against the total points the other team had for the year and adjusting it for what the scores would be if either she or the other Seeker caught the Snitch right then. She hadn't scanned the reactions of the other players or the crowd for signs of the Snitch like she normally did, using them to notice what she alone might not have seen. She spent the entire match obstructing Ginny Weasley, cutting across her flightpath so she would have to quickly turn, mirroring the paths in the air she guided her broom on, feinting for invisible Snitches when she knew Ginny was watching her. When Ginny finally did catch the Snitch, taking her broom into a violent nosedive in the process, she shot Cho an angry look that said clearly So there! across the pitch, but Cho found she wasn't fazed by it. The game had been fun.

As she left the changing rooms to meet Katie, she realised she didn't even know what the final score had been.

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"I'm not even sure we can do this," Cho protested. She glanced at the woman in the large painting she and Katie stood in front of, who seemed to be regarding her with some suspicion over a wine glass.

"Sure we can," Katie said, "just block your ears or something."

"Block... wait, what?"

"So you don't hear the password."

"Password?" The woman with the wine sighed.

"To the common room," Katie clarified. She turned to the portrait and asked, "That's okay, right?"

"Technically," the woman said. She looked like she would have preferred to have been able to say with authority that it was not okay.

"We don't have a password," Cho said.

"You don't? How do you keep people who aren't in your House out, then?"

"It's a secret," she said, and covered her ears. Katie pulled a face. Cho pulled one back and smiled at her. Katie then turned and gave the secret Gryffindor password to the woman in the portrait in what must have been a low voice, since Cho didn't hear it. The woman in the portrait sighed once more, and then the whole frame swung to the side to reveal the Gryffindor common room, filled with banners, red and gold streamers, and celebrating students. Several heads turned as Cho and Katie entered the room.

"Hey, you can't be in here!" came a voice. "Gryffindors only." It was Cormac McLaggen, who pushed his way past a couple of other students.

"Cormac, do you ever listen when anyone other than you speaks?" Katie asked, stepping forward to stand toe to toe with him. Although he was much taller and almost twice as broad as Katie was, he took half a step backwards. "Hasn't the Sorting Hat been making up these songs about House unity lately? I think Dumbledore might have mentioned something about it, too - you know who Dumbledore is, right Cormac?"

"Gryffindor still won the Cup," Cormac said.

"And now the game's over, we don't have to be hostile to the other team, right?"

Cho added, "I don't feel especially hostile."

"See?" Katie said. "No reason we can't celebrate that it was a good game."

"And that Slytherin's at the bottom of the ladder this year!" shouted a voice from the crowd, and this broke any tension that had been growing. Cormac still looked somewhat put out for a moment, but then made a show of noticing someone who was hailing him from the other side of the common room, although Cho suspected this had just been a way to leave and save face in front of Katie, lest she tell him off further.

Cho and Katie quickly found themselves in the company other members of the Gryffindor Quidditch team: Ginny, Dean, and younger members Jimmy and Demelza. Demelza in particular seemed very eager to recount every nuance of the match, and it was during one of her emphatic re-enactments, during which Jimmy's eyes never strayed away from her, that Dean excused himself from the conversation, giving a short backwards glance at Ginny as he walked away. Shortly after this, Demelza decided she needed to get something to drink, and Jimmy was quick to follow her. Ginny, who had done the least talking about the match, folded her arms and smiled after them.

"He is so sweet on her," she said. "Just like a Crup. It's the cutest thing." The three of them turned and watched Jimmy uncork a bottle of butterbeer for Demelza.

"I bet she hasn't noticed," said Katie. "He probably doesn't even know himself."

"He knows," Ginny said. "Some part of him does, anyway. Look at them. How could he not?"

Cho remembered something she had meant to do. "Hey," she said to Ginny, "good game today." She extended her hand, and Ginny shook it. "You flew well."

"You too, I couldn't tell when you had seen the Snitch and when you were faking. Did you actually ever go for it, during the game?"

It was at this time that a cluster of girls, apparently Ginny's friends, started hailing her with exaggerated waves. Ginny looked over at them.

"Guess you'll never know," Cho said, and Ginny excused herself to be with her friends, leaving Katie and Cho on their own.

"I think she was speaking a bit about herself there," said Katie after a moment. "With that stuff about Jimmy and Demelza."

"There's a boy that likes her?" Cho asked, and Katie shook her head.

"No, it's her that likes the boy."

"Does he know about it?"

"He might. But who really knows?" Katie looked at her. "Boys, right?"

"Yeah," Cho agreed, "boys."

They shared a significant look for a moment, and then both started laughing, sharing in something that wasn't quite a joke but was funny all the same.

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The night wound on; the common room still buzzed over Harry Potter's dramatic entrance and similarly dramatic wordless exit hand-in-hand with Ginny Weasley. Cho and Katie were sat on one of the comfortable couches, and had been for some time. It must have been coming close to midnight, Cho supposed, but she didn't feel tired and the party didn't seem in danger of flagging any time soon. She would be happy for it to stay this way until the sun came up.

"I'm not even sure what the big deal was," Katie said with a wave of her hand. It was clear what she was talking about.

"No," Cho agreed, "it was just a kiss."

"Right," Katie said, "what's such a big deal about a kiss?"

"It's not a big deal at all," Cho said. She was watching Katie.

"Not at all," Katie agreed. She was now looking at Cho instead of gesturing off into the distance.

"It's a bit silly, how everyone's got so worked up over just a kiss." It didn't feel like they were having a conversation but instead were making moves back and forth in some game where they both only had a dim understanding of the rules.

"It is silly. It's just a kiss." Katie seemed very close.

"Just a kiss." Cho leaned a little closer to her.

"Not a big deal." Katie's voice was very low. Cho noticed her eyes were closed.

"Not a big deal."

Cho's lips brushed across Katie's, and while the rest of the room didn't disappear from existence, the universe didn't reduce itself to just the two of them, time did not slow to extend the moment to last forever, great swells of music did not begin to play and fireworks were not launched into the sky, Cho found this was unimportant. She didn't want the music and fireworks, didn't need the extra time, didn't care what anyone else might or might not think. Katie's leg was pressed against hers, Katie's hand held in hers, Katie's lips pressed against hers. She loved Katie; Katie loved her back. That was all she wanted. That was what was most important.

09-12-04